Unless You Wildly Believe

Twenty minutes late on the first day of class, the sound of my painting professor's leather boots clapper a top the studio floor that's stained with years of student splatter.

"Let me tell you how you can succeed in this class..."

Professor Klank pulls a stool into the middle of the circle, luckily facing my direction, and begins on an hour-long speech that will convince me that this course just might change my life. He hands out our syllabus and proceeds to explain that it is a "non-syllabus" because this course should be fully participatory, and therefore equally discovered rather than dictated.

His hair is bright white, yet spiked as if he's 24 in an extreme rock band. He is petite, but in no way docile--this guy definitely works out at 60-odd years old. And the bright white line of facial hair no wider than a pencil that traces from the bottom of his lower lip to the end of his chin goes far beyond original to the territory of distracting. But the sweetness of the permanent lines he's engraved across his temples from his smiling eyes has the power to pull me back to that place from which his soul speaks.

In a slow but demanding voice, he says to a class of 20 students, "Do not place your canvas upon the easel to lay your paint strokes down unless you wildly believe that what you're about to create will set the world on fire."

Klank catches the spark of intrigue on my face, and his icy sky blue eyes pierce through his silver lashes and stab me like a syringe filling my lungs with oxygen.

"Of course, your ability to reason will remind you that, in fact, you will not create a masterpiece. But your rationale, your reasoning, must not stand in the way of your belief in yourself to do something master-full. The belief itself is the most radical masterpiece there is. And what you ultimately create is no where near as important as how you ultimately create."

At this point, I'm completely hooked into what this guy is saying, and I glance around the room expecting to see other faces as excited and transfixed as I am. But that's not the case at all. What I see instead is clusters of women sorting through the syllabus for some kind of tangible directions, or rolling their eyes at the strangeness of this wild professor's words.

And that's when he makes the jab.

"There is nothing I detest more in this world than mediocrity," he says in a matter-of-fact yet non-smug way (as hard as it is to imagine).

"Without wild belief in yourself as wonderful, master-full, and potentially brilliant, who you are and what you make in this world will never escape the bounds of mediocrity. And that goes not just for art, but for whatever you do in your life."

He goes on to tell us a story about wearing a fur coat to his in-laws house and the disaster that ensued (tangential, for sure)...and continues babbling for another 15 minutes about his family life. I admit this guy didn't give us hardly any direction about what we'd be doing in the class (a bit challenging for me, especially--the only non-art major in this advanced painting class), but who cares! How often do you meet a person, let alone a professor in college, who truly wants you to expand your boundaries of self-love and wild authenticity?

Maybe I'm not supposed to be in this class to learn more about the technicalities of painting. Maybe I'm supposed to be in it to learn how to call myself a painter. How to believe that I'm an artist. How to grant myself permission to feel certain that I am master-full. And how to believe that just maybe, my work will set the world on fire.